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I'm rereading Orwell's 1984 and this all seems a bit like Ministry of Truth and its whole newspeak ordeal (of course MT was a bit more absurd - they wanted to get rid of all ambiguity in language also).

I wonder if this was maybe Orwell inspiration?



The inspiration for Newspeak is Basic English, which is much like Esperanto but with English words (at least it's described as such — I'm not actually very familiar with Basic English myself). Constructed languages had some avid supporters back in the early 20th century, looking to make some constructed language the international language. Though I don't know much about Basic English, the unique looks of Newspeak definitely come, directly or indirectly, from Esperanto's ideas for keeping the vocabulary small and simple. To illustrate, in Esperanto the word for "good" is "bona", "bad" is "malbona" ("ungood"), and "to improve" is "plibonigi" ("to moregoodify").


I was wondering more about why he put newspeak in 1984 as a way for party to controll people minds and eliminate "though crimes". I do not know history of Basic English and Esperanto but it seems very improbable that their creators were aiming at the same goals as Ministry of Truth.


The organization predates George Orwell by around 20 years... so I guess nope ;D

But I agree with the similarities of the Ministry of Truth, and what it wanted to achieve. The issues as I mentioned is that I don't think there's a universal truth to anything; and therefore eradicating wordings or forms of language that are "not good" is a very subjective perspective.


>> The organization predates George Orwell by around 20 years... so I guess nope ;D

I do not understand - OP was mentioning that the organization worked through second world war and was event at Nurimberg trials. An Orwell written 1984 in 1949. What do you mean that this organization predates Orwell ?

I was just insinuating that Orwell might have known about this history (and probably about similar like this) and use this as inspiration for how dictatorships can use purification of lanuguage for their purposes (in case of Orwell it was more about controling "thought crimes" then abount simple national identification).




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